Centenarians see coronavirus through lens of past crises

Sunday

They lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, the Great Depression, the polio epidemic and World War II. How does the current crisis compare?

She is 104 and still has a mental image of what many say is the closest crisis to the coronavirus.

The flu pandemic of 1918.

It’s Mary Latowski’s oldest memory.

She was one of a half-dozen folks around age 100 I asked about past upheavals.

The Great Depression.

World War II.

Polio.

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Maybe, I thought, there would be perspective for today.

I didn’t plan to include the flu pandemic, which left 675,000 Americans dead. Who would remember?

Mary did.

She grew up in Coventry in a worker’s mill house with four families. In 1918, two of the fathers died of influenza.

She can picture one of the funerals.

“The coffin was on a horse and buggy,” Mary said. “It really stuck with me, seeing that. To this day, I still remember.”

It’s a reminder to her that pandemics touch everyone.

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Mary still lives in Coventry now with her daughter and son-in-law, Linda and Harry Masiello.

I spoke to her by phone, soon moving the conversation from 1918 to 1929.

The start of the Depression.

In October of that year, the economy was suddenly in free fall.

All around her, Mary recalled, just like now, countless folks lost jobs.

But back then, there was no such thing as unemployment compensation.

People had to improvise.

Chicken coops became common.

“Everybody had a garden,” Mary said. “You needed one to survive.”

Her parents buried potatoes and carrots from it in sand in the basement to keep them fresh for the winter.

In time, many paid a high price — her aunt and uncle in Chicopee, Massachusetts, lost their jobs, and then their tenement house when the family in the rental unit couldn’t afford to pay.

Others had similar memories.

Earl Eddleston, 98, was the son of Woonsocket mill workers who lost jobs in the Depression.

Claire Cipriano, 97, grew up on Greenville Avenue in Johnston, and she recalls similar things — gardens and chicken coops.

And forget about shopping.

“I had three dresses to last the whole year, a dollar a dress,” Claire said. “And one pair of shoes.”

When the sole fell off, she used an elastic band to hold it back on.

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Claire today lives in Johnston’s Cherry Hill Manor, near where she grew up.

She offered another memory, reminding us that the country has faced many epidemics we seldom think about anymore.

In 1930, when she was 7, her mother died of tuberculosis, also highly contagious.

“It was scary,” Claire said. “My sister and I had to go for tests all the time.”

I moved on to America’s next great upheaval — World War II.

What, I asked, was home-front life like?

For Mary Latowski, the 104-year-old, some of it echoed the Depression.

It was a time of shortages.

Store shelves lacked basics. It was an event if you found butter.

She married in 1940 and had a son. But soon afterward, the superintendent of the Coventry Co. textile mill came to her home asking if she could work. With most men gone, they needed the help.

Mary went on the late shift as a weaver, alongside other women. It was the same in a nearby gun factory.

They put in long hours to support the fight, comparable to frontline workers now in emergency room, grocery and first-responder jobs.

With predictions today of 100,000 or more COVID-19 deaths in the United States, I asked Mary about World War II losses — 400,000 U.S. soldiers died.

Everyone, she said, knew people who were lost.

Mary had two airmen cousins shot down over the Pacific.

“It was a shock,” she said.

Although news like that became common, it made it no easier. She recalls her aunt, the mother of one of the lost airmen, almost having a nervous breakdown.

I also talked to Timothy and Aurora Beckett, who live in the Tockwotton residence in East Providence. Tim is 100 and Aurora 96.

Like the others, we had to speak by phone — no visitors allowed. My own mom, in assisted living at 92, has been similarly isolated from family for weeks, with perhaps months to go.

Although different in nature, it got me asking the Becketts about the separations in World War II as millions of soldiers were deployed.

Aurora remembers dropping Tim off at the train station to head to training. The next time she saw him was a year later.

That — and longer — was common. Separation became part of life.

Both Tim and Aurora also recall daily fear on the home front. City lights were turned off at night because everyone expected an attack.

In a very different way, it echoed today’s “war” — constant fear of an invisible enemy.

The Becketts shared Mary Latowski’s same home-front experience — it was a big deal to find basics like meat.

Disasters and food shortages go hand in hand.

I moved on to an upheaval similar to COVID-19 — polio.

Like coronavirus, symptoms varied. Some cases were mild but a few percent — a high rate — were catastrophic, causing paralysis and death.

There were on and off epidemics over decades, some of the worst in the 1940s and 1950s with thousands dying a year, and countless left sick and paralyzed before a 1955 vaccine ended it.

Children were especially vulnerable, and Aurora Beckett of Tockwotton remembers telling her own they couldn’t play with friends.

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They constantly washed hands, and she didn’t allow them to go to swimming pools, since the virus was transmitted through water.

If someone had a stiff neck — an early sign — families panicked.

“We knew of a friend’s mother who had it,” Tim Beckett said. “She had to be carried everywhere. She was really stricken.”

Claire Cipriano of Cherry Hill Manor remembers a neighbor’s daughter getting polio around age 12. It began to paralyze her breathing and the girl was put in an iron lung — the equivalent of respirators today.

Claire described the way it looked.

“I remember her in like a casket, just her head out.”

Wards in hospitals were filled with dozens of the body-size metal cylinders. Some recovered breathing after weeks. But not all.

“My cousin had polio, too,” Claire said. “She was limping. She didn’t have it as bad. That was polio; some got it worse than others.”

Claire recalls people avoiding crowds and beaches, many sheltering at home.

Some put up signs stating: “Quarantine house.”

Beverly St. Pierre, also living in Cherry Hill Manor, is, at 78, the youngest of those I spoke to, but there’s a reason I picked her.

She had polio herself, and is still living with it.

She grew up in Pawtucket, a daughter of factory workers, and got it when she was 3. It affected her legs, leaving her with a limp.

Then, in a rare case, she got it again at age 7, which left one of her hands crippled.